I wasn't aware there were regulations over language use. Translator software works quite well these days after all. I noticed that there were some 200+ people listing Iran as their location, with many just posting albums and not attaching them to anything. Perhaps it's a language thing, I don't know. It's a shame as a lot of it is on impressive feats of climbing, though as elsewhere there are lots of examples of nothing to do with climbing too.

Is there an actual rule that summitpost has to be unilingual english? Maybe an opportunity to branch out... There seem to be lots of members from non english speaking places. You could add a ton of content without changing the browsing experience, with a bit of a tweak to the programming. Wikipedia has millions of articles in other languages and you would never notice it whilst surfing in English, but perhaps that is a stretch to compare summitpost to Wikipedia.

trevbo wrote:Is there an actual rule that summitpost has to be unilingual english? Maybe an opportunity to branch out... There seem to be lots of members from non english speaking places. You could add a ton of content without changing the browsing experience, with a bit of a tweak to the programming. Wikipedia has millions of articles in other languages and you would never notice it whilst surfing in English, but perhaps that is a stretch to compare summitpost to Wikipedia.

The topic was discussed in couple of other threads. I'm not a moderator but from what I know of the rules, yes, the pages must be written in English. It doesn't have to be a perfect English as many (most ?) of us aren't from English speaking Countries (there is no rule about being originating from these countries to be a member). Generally that's ok as long as people understands. The tolerance varies also a bit depending on the location, if you write pages about mountains in UK, perhaps a higher standard will be naturally expected from their readers. For mountains of remote places whose languages have little in common with those in Latin Alphabet, we are just glad people make the effort to do them. Iran and other Asian countries are full of these gorgeous mountains we have all to learn about. It is just a shame, as it was stated above (but newcomers from the western world also often forget about it), that many good pages aren't attached and properly structured with arborescence of regions and ranges. In my own opinion SP would benefit a lot of having some sort of "taxonomy committee" made of voluntary elves, recognized members that would own a specific elve status related to this task, and who would browse this kind of orphan pages and basing on available information (encyclopedias, on the net on anywhere else), organize them as good as can be.

visentin wrote: In my own opinion SP would benefit a lot of having some sort of "taxonomy committee" made of voluntary elves, recognized members that would own a specific elve status related to this task, and who would browse this kind of orphan pages and basing on available information (encyclopedias, on the net on anywhere else), organize them as good as can be.

There is a section in the forum taxonomy-planning.html but doesn't get used too much, and I think the existing elves have requested being notified for where things can be attached that aren't. Considering the scale of the task though perhaps delegating the task to specific people would be a good idea, there's enough other stuff for the regular elves to deal with. I'm forever asking people to attach pages to other pages but there's usually no response given the regularity with which people sign in. Or things get attached the wrong way round by newer members. The lack of coordinates on many pages also bugs me as the peaks don't show up on maps (not that the maps are working at the moment but that's another story). Many are a hundred miles out. Again the regular elves have requested to know about these but it would be a lot of work.

visentin wrote: In my own opinion SP would benefit a lot of having some sort of "taxonomy committee" made of voluntary elves, recognized members that would own a specific elve status related to this task, and who would browse this kind of orphan pages and basing on available information (encyclopedias, on the net on anywhere else), organize them as good as can be.

There is a section in the forum taxonomy-planning.html but doesn't get used too much, and I think the existing elves have requested being notified for where things can be attached that aren't. Considering the scale of the task though perhaps delegating the task to specific people would be a good idea, there's enough other stuff for the regular elves to deal with. I'm forever asking people to attach pages to other pages but there's usually no response given the regularity with which people sign in. Or things get attached the wrong way round by newer members. The lack of coordinates on many pages also bugs me as the peaks don't show up on maps (not that the maps are working at the moment but that's another story). Many are a hundred miles out. Again the regular elves have requested to know about these but it would be a lot of work.

In fact the Elves were never in charge of doing the taxonomy. They give a help from time to time to adopt or fix couple of things when a member isn't active, but they are not doing the taxonomy on a regular basis. I think one of the mistakes of the designers of this site is to have thought that it would auto-manage itself by people. But it is not. Or, more or less depending on the mentality of people in each country (look at the perfect taxonomy of the Eastern Alps...). Now the task is huge because the gap went increasing from the start, despite the regular cleanups of "bad submissions" and the likes. But few experiences from a year or so, in some regions of Europe with few enthusiastic members showed that a bit of motivation can tidy a lot withing a short time. I believe that with people permanently dedicated to this kind of task SP would look much better.